Is the "Review dashboards for aging tasks" action item you added to your list after reading a recent post becoming an aging task itself?

Even if you are capturing and completing dozens of tasks each week, a couple of them will invariably be "amorphous blobs" or have something about them that leads you to not complete them quickly. Over time those tasks with a high "cringe factor" can slowly accumulate until several dozen of them are bloating your next-action lists and making your whole system ineffective.

There are several ways to address aging tasks:

Do them

Realize you've already done them

Delegate them (better late than never)

Identify a shorter/more concrete "physical" next action to precede them (try using the new MindReader i tag)

Move the start date out into the future to a time that makes sense.

Banish them to the someday/maybe list for a spell.

If you have a lot of "blob" tasks, it can be difficult to determine which to attack first. In order to help address this there is now a simple GyroQ "naaa" next-action-age-analysis tag, which you can install in one step by pasting the naaa tag packed text into the GyroQ dialog box and then run on your Daily Action Dashboard. This tag uses a subset of the code in the more extensive "next-action-verb-analysis" macro and reports its results right on the dashboard rather than in a separate map. Note that this only works well if a large percentage of your actions have start dates associated with them.

The naaa tag analyzes the the next actions in your Daily Action dashboard that have start dates and calculates their average age. It then looks for the oldest 10% of the task and adds them to a new branch on the dashboard. You can use the goal of lowering your "average age" metric as a way to motivate yourself to address your aging tasks.

[…] several snippets of code that were previously shared separately including Next Action Roulette, Fire the oldest 10% of your tasks, Are your Next Actions eligible for Retirement, and "percent complete". No other a […]

Chris said,

Hi AO, I can't seem to get NAA to work via the GyroQ tag or the macro. I've downloaded the latest version of MindReader via the setup script. Please confirm which dashboard the NAA tag should be run on. I've got several verions of the Daily Actions dashboard and want to be sure that I am using the correct one.
Cheers
Chris

Chris said,

Think I've solved it. I suspect I was using a tweaked version of the dashboard. I needed to step through the macro to get the 'do you want to create a naa configuration map' dialogue but all seems to work ok now.

[…] 12 were over 6 months old. While I generally practice strategies for dealing with aging tasks (see fire the oldest 10% of your tasks), the antibiotic resistant strains had accumulated. I also had several projects with a waiting-for […]

Welcome to ActivityOwner.Com

I have been personal and corporate user of ResultsManager since March 2005. This site is my way of trying contribute something back to the internet community as well as to to organize my understanding of GTD and management. The MindReader, Outlinker, Mark Task Complete, Next Action Analysis, and Map2Excel add-ins are worth a look and can be installed by downloading setup programs.